Category Archives: euicommunity

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I helped Adobe quash bugs

Posted on March 31, 2009 | 1 Comment

ok well actually I didn’t as I didn’t even have Flex builder open. I did however act as host for a few other folks to get together at the EUI office to help Adobe Quash Bugs.

This past weekend, a few folks who’d never met got together at the EUI office for some good ol’ fashioned nerd fun. Adobe Seattle held a bug quash, and allowed developers all over the world to help out.

I freely admit I’m not a bug quash level developer, but I am good at hanging out with people I don’t know and (i hope) creating a fun non-sucky environment.

We hung out from 11a – 5p drinking soda, eating pizza (Ordered with Dominoes really cool pizza RIA).

We actually did cause two bugs to be closed, though not through actual code writing. But hey, there’s two less bugs in the bug base because of the efforts of the Denver Bug Quash crew, and me (I mean I bought the pizza and soda)

over all it was fun. I hope Adobe does more of these events. It’s funny to me to see events now from the frame of mind of someone who does events, cuz the bug quash was an example of barely controlled chaos most of the first 3-4 hours. That should be smoother by bug quash 2, assuming there is one, but still, its funny to see non event people do events.

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Posted in 360Conferences, community, eui community, euicommunity

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What a stupid AIR problem to have

Posted on December 4, 2008 | 3 Comments

Lately I’ve become very fond of the expression “This is a stupid problem to have”, the other night I got to use it in relation to AIR.

I’m working on a tool to view (hopefully) live survey data for when we have booths at conferences. We’ve come up with a simply iPhone survey, and want to be able to see the data in, more or less, real time.

I’ve been working on it, largely at the office, checking the code into SVN when I’m going to work from home. At some point in the last few days, I ended up with Flex Builder 3.0.2. Probably my best friend Adobe Updater.

The other night, I wrapped up at the office, checked in all my code, went home, fired up Flex Builder. When I went to test the app, ADL fired up, then immediately vanished. weird. Tried a few more times, still no joy. Restarted Flex builder, restarted my Macbook, nothing. Checked to make sure my Flex Builder was up to date, it was.

After finally giving up, I check back at work, app runs. Then I check to see if that Flex Builder was up to date. It wasn’t, 3.0.1, so I updated. Ran the app. ADL vanishedright after launching.

I decided to run the app in debug, see if that revealed anything. It did sorta. The message was just about useless, something to the effect of “The app crapped out before the debugger could connect”

I say just about useless, since it was enough to lead me to Cameron’s blog, where he mentioned an error he had gotten. It wasn’t the same error, but since I had just moved from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2 and AIR 1.5 had recently been released, I figured I’d check it out. Sure enough in my app descriptor it was set to 1.1 for AIR.

Now I certainly don’t need Adobe to hold my hand, but really, maybe just a few more descriptive error messages, shoot I’d take a message that gave me a few possible causes that I could run down on my own.

Why make things harder than necessary? What a frustrating waste of a night, just because Flex Builder and ADL couldn’t suggest I check my app descriptor.

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Posted in Adobe Flex, euicommunity, RIA, Technology, Work

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EffectiveUI Does Android change the game for Apple?

Posted on September 24, 2008 | 4 Comments

With Tmobile announcing the G1 yesterday, and Android SDK 1 hitting the streets as well. I’m wondering what Android means to Apple.

I’ll admit I wasn’t onboard with Android, and am still not sold, but I have to admit, watching the video, and reading some of the live blogs from the event yesterday, the G1 is compelling.

The UI might be a bit too unstructured, it looks like you can drop an icon any old place you choose, but I’m guessing you can auto arrange too. But the overall experience seems solid. Compass street view, push Gmail? Hotness!

There’s an app store too.

Based on the pics of the app market on Giz, I have to say, Blech.

I’m the first to jump on the apple-bash-wagon for their app store process. I think their choke hold is hurting the market. I think their ambiguous rules, and Refusal to allow any competition with existing Apple apps, will stifle innovation in the short and long run. There’s only so many flash light apps we need. Hopefully 11 is it.

I think the solution lies in the middle. Google has said, there’s NO restrictions, which means the number of CRapps, will be in the thousands. While I’m sure that those apps will be voted down over time, etc. The odds of fining an app that you want go down just as rapidly as CRapps are added.

While Apple shouldn’t be so black box, and draconian, google might want to implement even just a few basic controls, before the market is swamped.

From Giz:

There’s a good side to the open no-limits, no-approval nature of the system: developers can publish anything they want. No prohibitions and controls means that developers will be able to access any part of the hardware, allowing software that is not allowed in the iPhone App Store, like tethering. On the other side, this may also bring bad things to the user end, since it opens the door to potential problems and conflicts that may affect the stability of the Android cellphone.

Unfortunately that’s Apple’s stated reason for their draconian practices, Steve doesn’t think we should have the ability to crash or brick our phones with 3rd party apps. Supposedly Apple vets apps for this. Still, it also allows Apple to block the apps they simply don’t like. Booo

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Posted in EffectiveUI, euicommunity, Google Android, Technology, Work

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setting up WordPress on a mac, easy minus one lame small gotcha

Posted on September 18, 2008 | 2 Comments

I’m installing Word press locally on my work laptop so I have a test bed for something bigger that I’m doing. I found an old OS X 10.4.x blog post guide, which was really helpful, until it got to connecting Word Press to mySQL.

Then I lost all sense of self, and slowly went insane, for an hour.

I’m no dummy, but man, setting up PHP and Word Press on my mac was PAINFUL.

Getting PHP up and running, check.

MySQL. been there done that, check.

word press install, no check. kept getting “error connecting to database”

Googling revealed many posts on this topic, in the Word Press forums, the MySQL forums, and Apple. All talking about where the mysql.socket is kept, and how it should be in one place, but isn’t and many ways of working around that.

No joy.

Finally I did another search for Word Press on 10.5.x, which yeilded even more threads on the database error topic.

Then 6 months ago, on this thread, jonokane posted this gem,

Followup: After spending what seems like an absolutely ridiculous amount of time on this, I have figured out the embarrassingly simple issue.

localhost != Localhost

My Mac identifies itself as Localhost, NOT localhost! Learned something extremely obvious…. :)

So the config should look like this:

It certainly shoulda been obvious! I know the Mac is *nix, and capitalization is key, but it was just too close, too obvious. It was also the default, so it never occured to me to think on it.

So, lesson learned, and now, next time I do this. This blog post will light my way!

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Posted in EffectiveUI, euicommunity, Mac, Technology

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